Five Tales eBook

Huddling to him she whispered: “Yes, oh,
yes! If you die, I could not go on living.”

It was this utter dependence on him, the feeling that
he had rescued something, which gave him sense of
anchorage. That, and his buried life in the
retreat of these two rooms. Just for an hour
in the morning, from nine to ten, the charwoman would
come, but not another soul all day. They never
went out together. He would stay in bed late,
while Wanda bought what they needed for the day’s
meals; lying on his back, hands clasped behind his
head, recalling her face, the movements of her slim,
rounded, supple figure, robing itself before his gaze;
feeling again the kiss she had left on his lips, the
gleam of her soft eyes, so strangely dark in so fair
a face. In a sort of trance he would lie till
she came back. Then get up to breakfast about
noon off things which she had cooked, drinking coffee.
In the afternoon he would go out alone and walk for
hours, any where, so long as it was East. To
the East there was always suffering to be seen, always
that which soothed him with the feeling that he and
his troubles were only a tiny part of trouble; that
while so many other sorrowing and shadowy creatures
lived he was not cut off. To go West was to
encourage dejection. In the West all was like
Keith, successful, immaculate, ordered, resolute.
He would come back tired out, and sit watching her
cook their little dinner. The evenings were
given up to love. Queer trance of an existence,
which both were afraid to break. No sign from
her of wanting those excitements which girls who have
lived her life, even for a few months, are supposed
to need. She never asked him to take her anywhere;
never, in word, deed, look, seemed anything but almost
rapturously content. And yet he knew, and she
knew, that they were only waiting to see whether Fate
would turn her thumb down on them. In these
days he did not drink. Out of his quarter’s
money, when it came in, he had paid his debts—­their
expenses were very small. He never went to see
Keith, never wrote to him, hardly thought of him.
And from those dread apparitions—­Walenn
lying with the breath choked out of him, and the little
grey, driven animal in the dock—­he hid,
as only a man can who must hide or be destroyed.
But daily he bought a newspaper, and feverishly,
furtively scanned its columns.

VIII

Coming out of the Law Courts on the afternoon of January
28th, at the triumphant end of a desperately fought
will case, Keith saw on a poster the words: “Glove
Lane Murder: Trial and Verdict”; and with
a rush of dismay he thought: ‘Good God!
I never looked at the paper this morning!’
The elation which had filled him a second before, the
absorption he had felt for two days now in the case
so hardly won, seemed suddenly quite sickeningly trivial.
What on earth had he been doing to forget that horrible
business even for an instant? He stood quite
still on the crowded pavement, unable, really unable,
to buy a paper. But his face was like a piece
of iron when he did step forward and hold his penny
out. There it was in the Stop Press! “Glove
Lane Murder. The jury returned a verdict of
Guilty. Sentence of death was passed.”